ABSTRACT
The child and adolescent psychotherapy discipline at University College London Hospital is part of the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychological Medicine, which also comprises teams of clinical and systemic psychologists and child and adolescent psychiatrists. This chapter provides a psychoanalytic psychotherapy service to children and their families and to young people referred from within the hospital. It considers some experience of working closely with children with cancer. The chapter describes a narrative around the emotional impact of cancer on children and their families. A diagnosis of cancer immediately raises consummate anxieties both conscious and unconscious, around loss, dying, and death. This is in stark contrast to the more ordinary anxieties— and joys— around a child growing up that are associated with his emerging bids for independence. Children diagnosed with cancer may find themselves relying on their parents physically and emotionally in ways that may have been more typical of when they were younger.
